Toronto Is Stuck Because We Won't Choose

Accepting trade-offs is how we get unstuck

When I was growing up in Toronto in the 1980s, things were different. Toronto had just surpassed Montreal to become Canada’s most populous city, at barely 4 million residents. The average price of a home was around $100,000. Downtown was full of surface parking lots where you could park for free, including the areas that are now home to the Rogers Centre (SkyDome), Scotiabank Arena (Air Canada Centre), and even Roy Thompson Hall. The western branch of the Yonge-University subway line (now line 1) ended at Wilson, while buses still ran on Spadina, not replaced by streetcars until 1997. And while I used to ride by bike all over the city, there were no bike lanes, protected or otherwise.

Toronto has clearly changed a lot since then. Serious population growth and a massive increase in the cost of housing has resulted in extreme traffic congestion, a housing affordability crisis, and a general sense of frustration and cynicism about our city. To truly improve things and take Toronto to the next level, we need to make trade-offs. The things that worked for that Toronto, free parking, single-family neighbourhoods, everyone driving, made sense when there were half as many of us. But we’ve been trying to hold onto all of them while the city doubled in size. That’s why we’re stuck. We keep wanting the benefits of growth without giving anything up.

Most of the city is still comprised of single-family homes with no retail within walking distance. To increase housing supply, we need more density, which means duplexes, triplexes, and low-rise apartments. This will also increase the variety of types of units, with starter homes available to those just getting started. Retail within residential areas means people can walk instead of driving more of the time, reducing congestion. The trade-off is that the character of neighbourhoods will change.

Roadways are full of cars, and there’s no space to add more lanes. While driving from one place to another is what most people prefer, when everyone drives, the congestion has very negative impacts on productivity, the economy, and our sanity. Reliable, efficient, safe, and pleasant transit, cycling, and walking give people viable alternatives to driving. Once enough people make use of these modes, congestion decreases. The trade-off is giving up vehicle lanes for bike lanes and giving transit signal priority over passenger vehicles.

Less congestion means reallocating lanes to bikes and transit. Affordable housing means more density. Better transit means giving it green lights ahead of cars. Accepting these trade-offs can be difficult because we are used to things working a certain way, and change is hard. The good news is, once we stop pretending we can keep things as they were, the sooner we can resolve these major issues and see Toronto thrive again. Toronto isn’t stuck because these problems are unsolvable, it’s stuck because we won’t choose.